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Rear Window Sample

REAR WINDOW
Sample Essay Successful crime writer's know how to realise their intentions of keeping the responder's mind constantly busy trying to work out ‘who dunnit', often feeling as though they are working side by side with the detective to solve the crime and find the murderer. As well as effective characterisation, character motivation, and settings, crime writers must know the conventions of their chosen sub genre and more importantly how to use and subvert these conventions to achieve their intended purpose. To emphasis the timeless nature of crime fiction we can take a look at two film texts that exemplify how older texts can still entertain modern audiences as much as today's fast-paced modern texts do. Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window" was released over half a century ago in 1954, while Christopher Nolan's movie "The Dark Knight" represents the modern day crime-fiction text, being released just last year. "Rear Window", one of Hitchcock's greatest thrillers, is told almost entirely through his use of imagery rather than dialogue. His expert use of camera angles, shots and voyeuristic framing allows the audience to view the film mainly from the perspective of protagonist, L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies. It is difficult to place "Rear Window" or any Hitchcockian film into a single sub-genre of crime-writing, they may fit the hard-boiled category in some instances, but to give full justice to them, one could say that Hitchcock has created his own sub-genre: the Hitchcock Thriller. Studies and analysis into his films have uncovered many conventions of the Hitchcock Thriller. The most notable include: Framing for emotion: In "Rear Window" one of Hitchcock's main intentions is to ‘show' rather than ‘tell' the audience. He uses plenty of close-up shots to convey emotion on screen. A close-up allows the viewer to see a character's facial expression, such as when Jeff is about to fall from the window near the end of the film; it is pivotal that the audience...

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Hitchcock’s controlling tendencies showed with his actresses through his general attitudes towards them. Similarly Jeff cites Lisa’s wardrobe as evidence that she lacks the resolve to cut it in his world. She is too pampered and vapid to rough it on the road with him. Hitchcock takes mastery over women via costumes and through the camera on the contrary Jeff watches women with his camera through windows and objectifies them. Jeff objectifies these women by making judgments about them based on his superficial knowledge about their lives, for example Jeff identifies...

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Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 production RearWindow is indeed a film primarily concerned with masculinity, or better yet emasculation, and the male gaze. The central character L.B. Jefferies, or Jeff, is a newspaper photographer who recently broke his leg snapping pictures at an auto race. He is now confined to a wheelchair and spends all of his time observing his neighbors from his Greenwich Village Apartment window. When he sees what he believes to be a murder, he takes it upon himself to solve the crime. Aided by his nurse and beautiful girlfriend he attempts to catch the murderer, Mr. Thorwald, in the end proving his masculinity unquestionable. For the most part the audience views the film from Jeff’s apartment, or through Jeff’s eyes, immediately providing understanding of his male gaze and the changes it goes through. Evidence and traits of this male gaze are seen constantly throughout the film in both areas of gender and class.
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Voyeurism
In both films, RearWindow and Vertigo, film director Alfred Hitchcock requires audiences to put themselves in the position of voyeur as they witness the action of the film through the eyes of the protagonists. Hitchcock introduces to us the meaning of the word voyeurism and the control it can possess over a person. The main characters in both films are voyeurs’ and get their excitement from invading others’ life. Hitchcock was an English-American film director, writer, and producer, whose distinctive style has influenced several generations of filmmakers. In RearWindow and Vertigo, Jeff and Scottie’s lives are affected by voyeurism. Essentially, both men prefer to live by watching rather than live by doing.
First, Jeff is a voyeur by society’s standards because of his actions of watching others. Haven’t we all watched or stared at another person before? Does this qualify us as voyeurs? Jeff broke one of his legs while on the job as a photographer and is now stuck inside of his apartment until he is healed. While suffering through long, hot days in his apartment, he picks up a new hobby—spying—wherein he learns the intimate details of his neighbors’ lives. Lead into quote/give context: “I've seen it through that window. I've seen bickering and family quarrels and mysterious trips at night, knives and saws and ropes, and now since last evening, not a sign of the wife. All right,...

...RearWindow
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelley, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr
Screenplay: John Michael Hayes based on a short story “It Had to be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich published 1942
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Music: Franz Waxman
Paramount Pictures
Use of Subjective point of view.
Someone said there are two kinds of people in the world, there are people who observe world as it passes by and there are people who are active, adventurers who are part of the world. Normally, J.B. “Jeff” Jeffries is considered the latter. He works as a famous professional photographer until he gets a little too close to the action on a racetrack and breaks his leg. He is put in a wheel chair and confined to his small apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan with nothing else to do all day but look out at the neighbors. He then becomes obsessed with the salesman who lives in the adjacent apartment, and is convinced that he has murdered his wife. With the help of his stunning girlfriend Lisa and his in-home nurse Stella, they investigate the strange events that have occurred.
This shot of James Stewart, it shows what he’s looking at, see his reaction. That is the heart of Hitchcock’s filmmaking. He looks, you see what he sees, he reacts. He has incredible ability to out you in the POV of character. Does with considerable...

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Music conducts a large role in this film and as William Shakespeare once quoted “if music be the food of love, play on”. As the camera observes the neighbors, the song “To See You Is To Love You” by Bob Hope plays eloquently and subsequently harmonizes with the ongoing themes of voyeurism and relationships. The title of this song, upon grammatical dissection, illustrates the ideas of voyeurism: “To See You” and relationships: “To Love You”. This song inevitably draws to its source in the composer’s apartment which, as the viewer shortly finds out, is the root of all...

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We began the second half of the class discussing about the film RearWindow. Alfred Hitchcock’s RearWindow is a movie about an injured photographer’s (Jeff) accounts and observations of his neighbor’s daily activities through the windows of his confined New York City apartment. After being injured during an auto race accident, Jeff’s left leg was encased in castings up to his waist, leaving him immobile and wheelchair-bound. His “peeping-tom” behavior first started as merely an innocent activity to help his kill time, but later, it became an obsession. The film RearWindow is a critique on male voyeurism; critique of a peeping tom. In this movie, Hitchcock is able to draw a parallel between Jeff and the audience. Jeff’s relationship to the scenes outside his window is equivalent to the relationship the audiences have with the movie.
During the discussion, a question was raised, asking why there is much focus of Liza’s ‘potency’ (or Jeff’s impotency) in the reading we were assigned. In RearWindow, there is a highlight of the issue of male impotency; which is also common in other Hitchcock films. In conventional psychoanalysis, women present a treat of castration. Hence, men find ways of overcoming this with various strategies. In Rear...

...In crime writing, composers not only scrutinise justice but also experiment with textual forms and features in response to different contexts
In RearWindow (Hitchcock 1954) Hitchcock scrutinises justice through the actions by the detective in solving the crime, which causes the audience to question certain ethics during the context of the film. However, through the use of various forms of textual features, Hitchcock enables the audience to empathise with the characters in the film and try to convince them that justice is done.
Hitchcock introduces a different approach in solving the crime from the conventions of the Golden Age, as a result of the tense and rising suspicions from the Cold War and McCarthyism within American at that time. This is shown at the opening of the film, whereby the sense of voyeurism is shown through the establishing shot. The long shot and the panning of the camera illustrates the setting of the movie as well as the neighbourhood whereby the crime will take place. This idea of voyeurism is shown throughout the film as Jeff's curiosity towards his neighbours gradually turns into semi-professional spying. This is shown through Jeff's use of his photographic tele-lens and binoculars from his job as a photographer to spy on his neighbours. Stella's reaction to Jeff is shown through the metaphor “We've become a race of peeping Toms” which emphasises the surreptitious and spying nature of America from the communist...